Re: Symbolics/Intellicorp Announcement

[MILLER@VAX.CAM.NBS.GOV]

        Date: Tue, 14 Mar 89 18:23 EST
        From: barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)

        Does KEE do anything hardware specific that makes it less than trivial
        to port it to Ivory?  ...                                   what's the
        significance of the XL400 side of the agreement?
    
    KEE is a large complex product.  It would be silly for a company like
    Intellicorp to simply compile KEE for the MacIvory or XL400, and then ship
    it to customers without doing any performance tuning or software QA.  For a
    product like KEE, the job of porting it to a new platform like the XL400 is
    has a large component of testing and QA.
    
    See below.
    
        ----------------
        Date: Tue, 14 Mar 89 17:38 EST
        From: MILLER@vax.cam.nbs.gov (Bruce)
    
        I hate to be a killjoy but I keep hearing `You only have to recompile.'
    
    You do only have to recompile to get a working version on the XL400 or
    MacIvory.  However, it is naive to presume that the performance of any
    complex software product is going to be the same on an Ivory-based machine
    as it is on a 36xx, and naive to presume that an embedded system is going
    to have the same performance as an unembedded system.
    
    Some things on an Ivory-based platform will run faster than on the 3600,
    some things might run slower; code which has been carefully optimized for
    the 3600 might prove to be slower than one wants on the Ivory.  After all,
    the architectures are quite different.
    
    
Excellent reply, Scott.  However, my point was that in the past the
tone has been something like `You only have to recompile.  Oh... you *might*
want to tune a bit.'  I have always assumed that, in the end, I would be doing more
than just a bit of tuning.  But the implication of the annoucement ---
that this tuning is of a magnitude that warrants a joint development agreement ---
and certainly the tone of the reply seems to be `... If you are at all concerned
with performance you almost  certainly will want to tune a lot.'  
>From the technical point of view, this doesn't surprise me (or even bother me) 
all that much; but from the business point of view it seems to be a slight 
change of tune. No?

This leads me to the following tangent; I know that defsystem, et.al., is
supposed to help keep track of BIN & IBIN files.  Now I wonder: Will it help
us much in keeping track of separately tuned sources?   

I should point out that much our work involves a number of relatively small
(1-2 dozen files) systems used for research that are generally developed by
one person and used on only a handfull of sites/machines.   Performance usually
is an issue.  I couldn't live without defsystem, but a lot of its power is a
bit heavy; obviously designed for really large systems with many developers.

    			Bruce